38 MADEIRA METEOROLOGIC. PART iv. 



After sunset the red and crimson illuminations of the 

 cloud were most brilliant, almost bewildering. Nothing 

 approaching to its chromatic glory had been seen during 

 all our previous experience of Madeiran sunsets, and 

 even the native population was immensely excited, and 

 somewhat awed as to what it might portend. At that 

 time, too, the differences of colour between the outer and 

 inner boundary lines became still more striking, the 

 latter passing from brown into gray, while the former 

 were still gorgeously red ; and even up to 9 P.M., when 

 twilight had ceased, the northern border of the cloud 

 was lit up with a faint moon-like radiance, 1 and still the 

 central vertical axis of the whole seemed immovable in 

 the sky, anchored and moored fast, like the mountains 

 themselves, but far higher and without visible base. 2 



1 Although it looked like light " proper " to the cloud itself, yet I do not 

 think it was more than the faint twilight reflected from clouds at an 

 unusually high elevation. 



2 A drawing was recently prepared to illustrate the cirro-cumulus fringe, 

 and concentric interior rings of this remarkable cloud ; but on comparing it 

 when finished, after a lapse of nine months from the event, with a drawing 

 made within three days of the same, the latter, though intended only as a 

 subsidiary sky to a picture of an isolated lava rock, or rocky islet, off the 

 southern coast of Madeira, proved itself so far more satisfactory to the 

 assisted memory, that it has been adopted for the Frontispiece, and, by the 

 extra care of the engraver, represents the island's volcanic material as well 

 as her occasional cloud phenonema. 



The said volcanic material may often be traced from the interior heights 

 as an ancient lava stream, with scoriae on the surface, and denser, basaltic, 

 dark material below ; but the sea makes great havoc with it, in spite of its 

 hardness, at low levels ; and the isolated island in the picture is merely what 

 was once a part of the lava stream just visible in the foreground. 



